


The Web of Our Life Is of a Mingled Yarn

by HeraldAros



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-28
Updated: 2012-11-28
Packaged: 2017-11-19 18:40:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/576438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeraldAros/pseuds/HeraldAros
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During what was supposed to be a routine burglary of some noble's estate, Merrill and Anders find themselves trapped in a locked room scenario. This being Kirkwall, there are not one but two locked doors when no rogues are around to open them, dragons where dragons ought not be, and emotional outbursts of both the glowy and non-glowy kind. Mostly, it's Merrill and Anders walking and talking, followed by them fighting dragons and talking some more. Also contains: somewhat severe injuries, splinters, mentions of Broodmothers, Justice, one (1) Varric cameo, adapted canon banter, DA:O spells that didn't make the trip over the pond, and no blood magic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Web of Our Life Is of a Mingled Yarn

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to all the people who helped me through this project, especially when I was talking myself into the story via lots and lots of babbling; and also to ylva, who made such beautiful artwork, everyone should go look at her art [here](http://spader7.tumblr.com/post/36745138840) and tell her it's gorgeous.

The Harvey family hadn’t been fantastically wealthy, which was for the best. The last one died of natural causes, or so Varric claimed with a shrug, before asking if Hawke was getting _picky_ on him. Of course Hawke wasn’t; anyone trying to cobble together fifty sovereigns in a matter of months couldn’t afford to be too picky about work. So the last Harvey died, and their kin in Ostwick hadn’t cared about the property, the mansion... None of it was worth coming out to Kirkwall. Anders couldn’t entirely blame them.

In another week or so, the not-yet-actually-Guard-Captain Aveline had warned Hawke, the city guard would come in and make sure the place wasn’t full of squatters, or Carta thugs, or the larger sorts of vermin found in Kirkwall. After that, the seneschal would arrive and assess the property, go through the trouble of actually selling it and any valuables, take the lion’s share out in fees and taxes, and then send whatever was left to the rest of the family in Ostwick — for another fee, of course. But there was a golden opportunity in that in-between time, when no official records existed detailing exactly how much was here. 

“It’s not _exactly_ illegal,” Hawke was trying to explain to Merrill, on their way over to the mansion. Thankfully, it was a quiet night in Hightown, with no pretend-guardsmen out “patrolling” for easy marks. The moon was a thin blade of light shining down on the unrelenting grey stone, making even the sparse greenery of the nobles’ gardens look wan. “It’s more...questionable.”

“Oh, I’m sure the guard will believe that,” Carver said, twitching every so often and glancing over his shoulder. Carver was a nitwit with no idea of how to avoid getting caught, and Anders thought that as a man who had once been a nearly professional nitwit with experience in getting himself caught. “Aveline was giving us the evil eye from the minute you brought it up. She _knows_ we’re coming, Brother. She’ll arrest us for sure!”

Hawke rolled his eyes. “Oh ye of little faith. That is exactly why it’s _safe_ for us to go there tonight. Aveline may not like it, but she knows how things are; either she’ll be out patrolling tonight, or she’ll make sure whoever is will turn a blind eye to us.”

Privately, Anders was more suspicious of Aveline than Hawke gave any indication of being, though he had to admit that for someone so married to the law, she did have a soft spot for Hawke. She’d even gone with him to the mines, and _that_ had been a fun trip — guard and mage-hating elf on one side, Hawke and Anders comparing spells on the other. Anders had preferred the return trip, with Varric and Isabela along to help Hawke open up the few locked chests they had found.

The second trip had been necessary because Fenris, for all that he carried the biggest sword Anders had seen, didn’t know how to safely bash a lock. No finesse with him, no sensitivity or ability to handle delicate things like locks. (Or people.) Nor did Aveline, who had looked rather appalled at the thought, and Hawke hadn’t even considered the idea of whacking at anything with his precious staff. Anders had been tempted to give it a try, to save time if nothing else, but his staff had enough dents in it without adding more.

Anders also preferred that group to the one he was currently in. For all her licentiousness, Anders enjoyed Isabela’s company, and Varric always found a way to make conversation. Good, non-enraging conversation, conversation that didn’t lead Anders to want to bash his head into any walls because massive head trauma was preferable to listening. The only good thing that could be said for Merrill and Carver was that Carver more often than not fell into talking with her, which meant that neither of them was talking to Anders.

Now, though, Hawke had his arm around Merrill’s shoulders in a rather blatant way. Anders stared at their backs sourly, and internally scolded himself for doing it. He could try to pass it off as mere wariness over Merrill corrupting Hawke with her demons and blood-magic and fancy Dalish spells, but he was mostly jealous. Not hotly jealous — he knew what possessiveness felt like, and this was only the faintest shadow, impotent enough that he could shove it aside. It wasn’t even a sharp, sudden, unexpected spike of feeling. It was so familiar that, after only a few months, it had worn a groove in Anders’s mind. Hawke was like this with _everybody_.

He didn’t actually know which was worse: having to watch Hawke try to explain moral relativity to a Dalish in his low, warm voice, or noticing Carver eyeing that arm around those shoulders in much the same way Anders had been not a moment ago. Truly, when he felt the same way as _Carver Hawke_ , he had reached new and uncomfortable depths of contemptibility.

“But I don’t understand...” Merrill said as they approached the door and Hawke let go of her to pull out the key Varric had given him. What she didn’t understand was lost in the shuffle of checking to be sure there were no guards nearby, then unlocking and opening the door, checking for traps (Hawke hadn’t brought anyone to disarm them, but he had proven in the past that he was not above sending Carver to the Hanged Man to fetch Isabela or Varric), checking for guards inside, and finally filing in: Hawke first, both because he was leader and because he was the one with the lantern; Merrill came next, followed by Anders, both with their staffs held before them, ready to cast at a moment’s notice; and Carver brought up the rear, guarding their backs.

There was no one inside, to Anders’s relief, so Hawke took the time to light several torches around the room. The inside of the mansion was much the same as any Kirkwall mansion, giving the impression that someone had hired the same designers and builders to make every single nobleman and woman’s estate in the city. It probably had something to do with the Merchants’ Guild and monopolies, but Anders was thankful for it because it meant there were a finite number of places to set the standard sorts of traps that these mansions all seemed to have. (They probably had the Coterie to thank for those.) Since the floor plans were generally similar, it also made looting them easier: no need to wander through halls when Hawke had a good idea of where the master bedroom was, and the library or study.

Tonight, though, the familiarity was somewhat tempered by odd shadows. Usually, when Hawke had home-invasion jobs, the homes were better lit. Anders realized, and wanted to kick himself for taking so long to do so, that he was expecting to encounter _something_. Demons, maybe, or slavers, or thieves, or some other unsavory sort. Kirkwall was predictable, and much as Anders railed against parts of that, he _liked_ the city to be predictable. Now, he was tense, waiting for a surprise attack. An empty mansion absolutely couldn’t simply be an empty mansion, and the emptier — the _safer_ — it seemed, the more suspicious Anders became.

Rather than scout through either wing first, Hawke led their party up the stairs, encountering no traps at all. He tried the door to the left and, finding it unlocked, motioned for the rest to stay where they were while he first looked, then stepped inside.

“Kind of eerie,” Carver muttered, glancing around. Someone — probably Aveline — had beaten small-party tactics into his head: he had his back to Merrill and Anders, so he could watch for anyone coming from the front door or either wing of the house downstairs. There had been a time, perhaps a month ago, when Carver would have stood facing Merrill, leaving everyone exposed to a potential ambush. “I swear I’ve seen that painting in one of these places before.”

Anders glanced in the direction he was looking, spotted the portrait leaned up against the wall on the nearby landing, and snorted. “Of course you have,” he said quietly. “It’s a portrait of the last Divine. Mass-produced for the holy, if it’s even a real replica. It might be a forgery.” In fact, the painting in question was almost certainly fake, although it was hard to be sure in this lighting. Kirkwall was a city built on long-lost authentic tomes and relics as well as forgeries of such.

Merrill tipped her head to the side. “Like those ashes in Lowtown? Are there a lot of fake divine things in your religion?”

Carver sputtered, turning to look at her with raised eyebrows. “ _No_. Of course not. That’s — that’s blasphemous!” And then he glared at Anders, as if the existence of faux religious paraphernalia was Anders’s fault.

“Of course there are,” Anders corrected him. In all likelihood, Carver was already well aware of that fact, and had simply refuted it because Merrill made ‘fake divine things’ sound so _silly_. “Fools buy them, so swindlers sell them.”

“Found something,” Hawke called, though not loudly enough to be heard throughout the house. Hopefully. “Don’t think I can move this by myself. Can I get a hand in here?”

Merrill and Anders both entered the room, while Carver relocated to guarding the doorway. Hawke had, indeed, found something: there was a bookcase against one wall, empty of all but a few cheap baubles. The rest of the room — wardrobe, bed, small chest, drab rug — looked ransacked. There were thin cotton sheets wadded up against a wall, and a torn coverlet between them and the foot of the bed. While the sturdy wooden bed-frame was still intact, whatever mattress used to be on it was long since gone, as were any pillows. The rug had fared slightly better than the coverlet, with no obvious rips or tears, but had been kicked into a thin noodle of material against the wall. One of the wardrobe’s doors was splintered around the handle, probably from when the lock had been broken off. It was empty, with an equally empty hidden compartment sitting next to the corner it had been pried out of. The chest was actually split open, where someone had skipped picking the lock and simply broken or pried it off; all that was left when Anders glanced inside was a bracelet woven out of faded green yarn and a couple colorful feathers.

Merrill picked up both, and when he looked at her, just smiled and shrugged. He rolled his eyes and turned his attention to Hawke.

“It looks like someone else beat us here,” Carver said, before Hawke glared at him and he, with a put-upon sigh and much rolling of his eyes, turned around to face the open door. “Don’t be angry at me for your mistakes, Brother.”

“I think there’s a door behind this,” Hawke said, ignoring Carver. “But it’s heavier than I expected. Anders, if you give me a hand, we should be able to shift it and see what’s back there.”

Anders pulled from one side and Hawke pushed from the other. Though what was left in the room implied a minor noble family fallen on significantly hard times, the wood under his hands was smooth, if a little dusty. Evidently, it had been too heavy or cumbersome, or perhaps just too sentimental, for the family to part with. As he pulled, Anders estimated that he could probably get twenty silver pieces for it — twenty-five, if he gave it to Lirene. Getting it out of the house unnoticed would be the difficult part, and with a sigh he decided it wasn’t worth the very high chance of being caught. No doubt the thieves who had beaten them here had had similar thoughts, and had left it in favor of more portable valuables.

The few painted clay trinkets left on the shelves rattled, and the feet of the bookshelf scraped against the floor. A glance downward showed old scuffmarks, well worn into the floorboards. After a minute or two of effort, Anders and Hawke managed to move the bookshelf out from in front of what looked an awful lot like a door.

Hawke patted Anders on the shoulder as he thanked him. Hawke _smiled_ at him, and Anders found himself smiling back without really thinking about it. Hawke was good at that — at making other people smile, or laugh, or feel good about themselves. It was a gift he shared with Varric, although Anders had yet to experience the sudden desire to snog the dwarf senseless. It was probably Hawke’s scruffy little beard, and Varric’s comparative lack of facial hair, he told himself.

Picking up his lantern from where he’d set it down on the floor, Hawke pushed the handleless, unlocked door open and once again entered first. Anders cast a wisp; the small blue light wasn’t much, but no one besides Hawke had thought to bring (or had handy) a lantern, so it would have to do, barring handmade torches.

Anders had had a few nasty experiences with handmade torches. Unreliable buggers, as likely to burn a man’s fingers as light his way. The Warden-Commander had been big on them when there weren’t any mages in the party, or so he’d heard from Nathaniel; apparently, she put an end to the practice after Oghren had insisted on using his own belches instead of tinder. (He had, Anders understood, been argued down to belches alone from “gas of any sort.”) After that, a mage was required to go on every mission, and since “mages” meant “Anders and Velanna,” he had been happy with the arrangement. Velanna had been just as pleased to hardly ever see him, so everyone had benefitted.

Of course, that was when Mahariel had started making noises about conscripting more mages, followed shortly by her abrupt summons elsewhere and the sudden presence of Templar-Wardens in Vigil’s Keep. His benefits had been short-lived, and painfully revoked.

Merrill made a soft noise, and stepped closer to him so she could reach up and touch the wisp floating over his head. “I’ve never seen one of those before,” she said, and smiled when it passed through her fingers.

Either the sudden (if soft) light behind him or Merrill’s words made Hawke glance over his shoulder at them. Then he whistled appreciatively. “I’ve never seen one of those either. What is it, just a light?” He didn’t reach out to touch it like Merrill, but he seemed just as fascinated.

(Meanwhile, Carver was standing in the previously hidden doorway and muttering about mages and their tendency to get distracted by shiny things while there was work to be done. He wasn’t even pretending to pay attention to the room behind him, and it’d serve him right if someone snuck up him.)

“It’s a spell wisp,” he told Hawke (and Merrill, he supposed). “All it does is boost spell power a bit. They’re useful enough for healing, and they _do_ make decent lights when nothing else is handy.” Or, as the Warden-Commander had pointed out to justify making Anders teach Velanna, when one was exploring a location where an open flame really wasn’t a good idea, or they needed both their hands free. “It can’t attack, but the spell isn’t hard to cast. I can teach it to you,” he added, looking at Hawke. “It might come in handy.”

“Ugh, _mages_ ,” Carver said loudly. “Can’t you be mage-y on your _own_ time?”

Hawke winced, and shot Anders a rueful grin. “For once, he’s right. Another time?”

“Of course.”

Attention returned to the task at hand, the three mages began to explore the hidden room. Anders and Hawke took the walls, and the room was small enough that there was enough light for Merrill to walk between them.

As far as Anders could tell, everything in here was sentimental junk. That didn’t mean there wasn’t a cache of jewelry, or perhaps a collection of paintings more authentic (or more convincing) than the one on the stairs. So far, though, the only noteworthy find had been a _Treatise on the Modern Man_ , by a Chantry scholar whose name Anders didn’t immediately recognize, and that was noteworthy for its probable content rather than its monetary value. He’d show it to Hawke later, but the man had never had a problem with sharing out the loot before. The rest of the books he saw were either copies of books he already owned, or books he knew one of his friends owned.

Varric had a surprisingly diverse selection, and Hawke was well on his way to a decent little library, limited though he was by living with his uncle and having to save all his coin.

Anders reached the first corner (home to a boudoir full of dust) and turned to see the others’ progress. Hawke had evidently found more than him, or had taken longer because only one of his hands was free: he was only halfway down his first wall. Merrill was picking her way through stacks of boxes and pieces of furniture. It looked like, rather than a treasure trove, the hidden room was more of a storage repository.

With a sigh, and some mental grumbling because he could have been doing _useful_ work tonight instead of wasting time here, Anders started along the next wall. He had only gotten a few steps past the corner when there was an ominous creaking sound.

Across the room, Hawke froze, lantern raised. Merrill paused, and when the sound didn’t continue, moved. Hawke waited another heartbeat before doing the same.

Sometimes, houses just...made noises. It was strange to Anders, because Kinloch Hold only whistled a bit on particularly windy days, and sometimes tossed about disquieting noises and their echoes during storms. Vigil’s Keep had always sounded like there was a building project going on nearby, because there was: first to improve the Keep’s defenses in case of a Darkspawn attack, and then to repair those same defenses after the battle.

Creaking, though, was strange, and Anders never got used to it. Stairs creaked underfoot, letting others know when he was on them; floorboards creaked when he walked across a room; sometimes, during fights, the _walls_ creaked, especially if Carver or Fenris or Aveline rammed an enemy into them. That was most disturbing of all, and had managed the feat of temporarily replacing Anders’s nightly stroll through the Darkspawn portion of the Fade with terrible nightmares about the roof of his clinic caving in on him and his patients.

Of course, once he woke and was rational, he realized that he’d probably survive even that, thanks to Justice.

While the other two continued their searches, Anders stayed put, and sure enough, there was a second creak, even louder this time. 

“I think you should get out of there, _now,_ ” Carver said, voice turning high-pitched at the end, although it didn’t quite crack.

“Yes, let’s,” Hawke said, already walking toward the door. “I don’t think we’ll find any—”

The rest of his sentence was drowned out by a third creak, this time punctuated by a rather sharp _crack_ , then a crash and the sudden disappearance of the middle of the room.

Carver actually jumped, one hand braced on the doorway, the other wrapped around the hilt of his sword. “What the—”

“Stay close to the walls!” Anders shouted over him, looking around to see if there was any way to get some more light in the room. After a moment’s thought, he summoned a spell bloom, which did help rather a lot.

In terms of damage, there was a hole in the floor. Several pieces of furniture had fallen through, landing in what looked to be another closed-up room downstairs. Besides the heap of chairs and boxes, Anders couldn’t make out much below.

Correction: besides the heap of chairs, boxes, and _Merrill_. She called out an “I’m all right!” just before stepping into the light. What Anders could make out from several feet above her (and with questionable lighting) was not good: she appeared to have a number of scratches, as would be expected of falling along with wooden furniture, and those scratches were probably already bleeding. Temporarily setting aside his natural inclination — which was to first heal the cuts and then dunk the girl in water before she got it into her fool head to cast a spell with that blood — Anders also noticed that she was heavily favoring one leg.

“I don’t think I can make it back up,” she added. “Oh, and I’m bleeding.”

Hawke, the gallant idiot, approached the edge of the hole. “Are you fine for the moment?” At Merrill’s affirmative, he continued: “Carver and I will go find the door. Just stay right where you are, all right?” Then, to Anders, he said, “Do you think you can jump down there and take care of her? I’d rather she didn’t bleed out, or try to walk on that leg.”

Merrill wasn’t his preferred company for this sort of thing, but he _was_ a healer, and she was at least slightly more tolerable than others he could have been stuck with. (Aveline. Carver. _Fenris_ , Void take him.)

Besides, Hawke was looking at him hopefully, _expectantly_. He didn’t want to disappoint.

“Give me a second,” he said, eyeing the edges of the hole and the room downstairs. After some consideration, he carefully lowered himself down onto the highest pile of boxes. They shifted underneath his feet, but he managed to jump off of them before they spilled him onto the floor.

Hawke shouted down a “thanks, Anders!” while Merrill politely clapped for his successful landing. He almost glared at her, before remembering that it was _Merrill_ , and there were few people less inclined to deliberately mock him.

His little wisp had followed him down, although the spell bloom didn’t. From his glance around the room, it looked empty, but then, the floor in the room above had looked sturdy enough to hold a person’s weight. With a sigh, Anders directed Merrill to sit on the only unbroken crate he saw.

She complied with nary a word; he was simultaneously thankful and disturbed. The first thing he checked for was a concussion, but no, her pupils were the same size and there were no bumps on her head.

Then he set about healing the minor bleeding scrapes. There were several: one on her left cheek, another two on the inside of her left elbow. A long splinter had gotten past her chainmail and was lodged in her left thigh, and that was the trickiest to fix because Anders had nothing but his fingers and hers to get it out.

Merrill let him try to pull it out on his own once, then batted his hands away and did it herself. She hissed as it came out, and his hands were on the wound immediately.

“If it starts to look like that one’s infected, it means a piece of that splinter came off and is stuck inside. If that happens, come see me,” he said, magic flowing into the puncture wound. If they had been in his clinic, he would have been at least tempted to make sure there wasn’t a sliver left inside — magic couldn’t do that, but sterile tweezers and a good, strong light would do the trick. Here, however, he had fewer resources, and trying to get her down into Darktown with the splinter sticking out of her thigh would have _guaranteed_ part of it broke off. “Infections are nasty business. The sooner it’s spotted and healed, the better.”

She nodded.

With some patients, he might push the point — Hawke, for example, was terrible about injuries and illnesses. “Oh, I thought I would get over it,” he would say. “It didn’t seem like a big deal.” (Really, Anders was often tempted to sidestep that conversation entirely and just go to Leandra the next time it happened. _She_ , at least, knew better than to court scarlet fever or gangrene.) Best to head that sort of behavior off at the pass and describe, in graphic detail, the absolute worst consequences for whichever injury it was. Merrill struck him as smarter than that — or rather, stupid, but in a completely different and equally self-destructive way.

Still, she wasn’t saying anything, and that perturbed Anders. He checked for a concussion again, with his magic this time.

That got him an annoyed look. “I think my head is fine,” she said. “I can feel it when you do that, you know.”

Few enough of Anders’s patients had been mages, so no, he _hadn’t_ known that. No one at the Circle had ever complained...but then, he’d never faced serious injuries back at the Circle. Nor head injuries, for that matter. “Even if your head _wasn’t_ fine, you might think it was. That’s the nature of head injuries.”

She _huffed_ at him, like — like Hawke’s mabari, when the beast was told he shouldn’t charge the enemy before Hawke gave the order. She also rolled her eyes at Anders, a motion the mabari had yet to master.

“My head’s fine,” she insisted, and considering that his magic hadn’t picked up on any problems, Anders had to concede.

Her right side seemed entirely fine, aside from a bit of scraped skin on her right hand. The chain on her palm had protected most of it, but the fingers were unguarded and looked red and a little raw. There weren’t any splinters, though, and the skin was only broken in one spot. If Merrill hadn’t been a blood mage, or living in the Alienage, he might have left it alone. It was a waste of magic to heal, but leaving an open wound — no matter how tiny — on a blood mage was just stupid, and even if he told her to keep her hand clean, that was nearly impossible, given where she lived.

He healed it. She stretched, then curled her fingers, nodded, and murmured her thanks.

With all of the small problems dealt with, he turned his attention to her left ankle.

“Well, the good news is that it isn’t broken,” said Anders after a couple seconds’ examination with magic. He’d tried, once, to examine injuries without the spell, but it had taken so long and been so faulty that he didn’t bother, anymore. He was going to heal the wound with magic anyway, might as well use magic for the whole of it.

It was a pity he couldn’t do that for everything — the early stages of illness and infection, for example, were undetectable. Otherwise, there would be no question of whether her thigh was fine, and he’d be more confident in dealing with many of his Darktown patients.

In this case, he cast a spell to help with the swelling, even as he spoke. “You should still try to stay off of it for a couple days. It _is_ sprained, and you don’t want to damage it more. When Hawke gets back, we’ll see about bandages. Keep it wrapped up, and iced if you can.”

In the clinic, that would instantly be met with an incredulous look, or a “sure, thanks” and the distinct impression that his patient was lying to him. He understood that, and it broke his heart a bit, but he let those patients walk out of the clinic, knowing full well that they’d be back in a few days or a week. They couldn’t spare the time; they needed to work or beg for food and coin. Ice and bandages were hard to come by in the warmer months, and were never clean, not in Darktown. He tried to help as much as he could, but sometimes (too often), that wasn’t enough.

Merrill, though, was not so badly off. If she absolutely had to, she could get food from the Hawkes, or from Varric. (If any of them had to. It wasn’t exactly spoken of, but they all knew it, as far as Anders could tell. Despite needing every coin he could get for the Deep Roads Expedition, Hawke was more than willing to help out his friends, in addition to splitting the profits from every venture he dragged them through.) When Anders told Merrill to stay off her feet for a few days, he expected her to do it.

It was purely mercenary, he justified to himself. He’d rather not make a habit of having to heal the blood mage, and little as he wanted to make a house call in the Alienage, he’d prefer that to her coming down to his clinic. Part of it was out of worry for his patients — she was messing with a demon, and it could, at any moment, finally win the battle of wills and take over her body — but part of it was also out of worry for her; without Hawke or Varric to look after her, she’d be pickpocketed and conned out of all her things before she got halfway through Darktown.

If it was Fenris, he would wish for that and more, but Fenris went out of his way to be a prick, and Fenris fundamentally believed that mages should all be locked up. (Those were two separate problems Anders had with him, no matter how much they overlapped; if Fenris was just a prick, he might even like the elf. Nathaniel had been bearable, and the handful of people his own age that he’d spent any time at all with back at the Circle had a tendency to be...well, pricks. The nice mages had generally been content to stay where they were, and Anders never could stand that.)

Merrill, on the other hand, was sweet, but she was a _blood mage._ She was talking to _demons_. So far she only used her own blood, and she hadn’t gone to demons out of spite or malice, but that wasn’t enough. Her motivations wouldn’t save her, and the fact that she was a nice person otherwise wouldn’t make Anders stay his hand when that day finally came.

For now, though, he wished no ill on her.

“All right,” she said, ducking her head and twisting her fingers in her skirt.

He wondered how much pain she was in. Sprained ankles could be nasty, and combined with the possible infection in her thigh... He supposed they’d been lucky, up to now. Considering the sorts of places Hawke led them into, injuries like these should have been a lot more common for the group than they actually were.

“I’m going to see if I can find the door,” he said. “Stay right here. Don’t move.”

The room was large and empty. Anders approached the door that he suspected led to some sort of hall. He tried it, but it was locked, with no visible latch to unlock it from this side. The hinges were on his side, but despite the dilapidated state of the rest of the house, those were in good condition. He couldn’t pry them loose. Other than with a key he didn’t have, or liberal application of fire, he didn’t see any way to get the damn thing open.

He had just resigned himself to needing Varric or Isabela’s help to get out — unless Hawke tripped over the key on the way, which he didn’t put past the man — when Anders heard footsteps approach the door. Hawke’s voice, a bit muffled, followed shortly: “Anders? Merrill? Is this the right door?”

“It is,” he called back, knocking on it just in case Hawke was looking in a different direction. “I don’t think you’ll be able to get through. Unless you found a key?”

A laugh. “I wish. Hm. Carver, you mind holding this?”

It was hard to tell in the faint blue light from his wisp, but it looked like the light leaking in through the keyhole shifted. Hawke handing his brother the lantern, Anders thought, frowning. There was no way Hawke could pick that lock on his own, so what was he up to?

The question was answered by a thud, and then a pained moan.

“You _idiot_ ,” Anders called out, torn between wanting to laugh and shake Hawke. “Who do you think you are, Aveline? You can’t force your way through this door!”

“It was worth a try!” Hawke sounded entirely too cheerful for someone who could have dislocated his shoulder with that stunt. “I think we have to go get Varric, though. Or Isabela. She should still be awake. How’s Merrill?”

Anders glanced behind him. As far as he could tell, she was exactly where he’d left her, although all he could make out from here was a girl-shaped blob in the shadows.

“She shouldn’t walk for a couple days, maybe even a few weeks. No trekking out to the Bone Pit or up Sundermount for at least a month. Otherwise, she’ll be fine.”

“Good. You don’t mind keeping her company until we get back?” There was just the slightest edge in Hawke’s voice — not a threatening edge, but...expectant. Like Hawke was going to get his way, and knew it, and there was no use in Anders arguing because Hawke would win anyway.

It was an eloquent tone. Anders wished that he could replicate it, for use on his more recalcitrant patients.

So. Keep Merrill company. He could do that. He didn’t particularly _want_ to, but it was far from the worst thing he’d been asked to do.

“I’ll be fine,” he said.

“Good man. We’ll be back soon.”

“Try not to burn the house down while we’re gone.” That was Carver.

Anders rolled his eyes and didn’t dignify it with a response.

As he turned and started back toward Merrill, though, he caught sight of something else in the room: another door. Frowning, he went over and tried it. This one was unlocked, but led immediately into a staircase, heading down. A cellar, probably; either that, or a route into Darktown, or both.

“What’s that?” Merrill called out. Still frowning, Anders shut the door and walked over to her.

“Cellar door.”

“Oh.” She looked curious, but then, Merrill seemed to be curious about everything. That included the worst things to be curious about, he reminded himself, such as blood magic and demons.

“Thank you for coming down here with me,” she said. He stared at her. She just smiled back. “And thank you for healing me. I know Hawke probably asked you to, but thanks anyway.”

“You’re welcome,” he said slowly, eyes narrowing. “You don’t have to keep thanking me.”

Instead of responding to that, she turned her attention to his wisp. “Is it always blue?”

With a sigh, he sat down near enough to her that she could see without being tempted to stand on her injured ankle. “Yes.”

She frowned. “Well, it’s a lovely blue, but don’t you think you’d get tired of it after a while?”

He looked up at the wisp. It was a nice blue, he thought, although he could do with it being brighter. There was a circle of light, a couple feet wide at most, which let him and Merrill see one another. Past that, the room fell away into shades of dark blue. The far wall was completely invisible, and even the doors were too shadowy for him to make out their handles.

“I don’t use it enough to get tired of the color,” he said after a moment, returning his gaze to her.

She sighed. “Well, that’s a pity. If I knew how to do that, I’d use it all the time! I—”

Anders leaned forward suddenly, cutting off her sentence. “You would _not_. Are you daft? You’ve been in Kirkwall for months now, surely you’ve realized that the Templars would _notice_ if you had a floating light above your head!”

Really, it was like she had no concept of what her getting caught would mean to the rest of them. For the rest of them.

“I didn’t mean _all_ the time,” she told him, rolling her eyes once more. “Just when I’m with Hawke, or when we’re outside the city.”

Anders leaned back, but didn’t back down. This was a point that she _had_ to understand. “You shouldn’t use flashy magic _anywhere_ in the city,” he said, “with Hawke or not. And that includes blood magic, although I doubt you’ll listen.” Which was really the entire problem with Merrill: she refused to take any of his advice, and swanned through life as if her actions had no consequences. She wasn’t just naïve, she was _purposefully_ so. She resisted every attempt to make her see reason.

“You use flashy magic all the time. The healing and all.”

He considered pointing out the _numerous_ precautions he’d taken, or the amount of time he and Lirene had invested in making sure both he and his patients would remain safe. He considered pointing out that, unlike both Merrill and Hawke himself, Anders had managed to keep the Templars from noticing him _without_ any criminal connections. (Athenril for Hawke, although he understood the two had had a falling-out several weeks before Hawke had walked into his clinic; Anders didn’t know much about that, and didn’t care to learn. For Merrill, Varric had probably started paying bribes to keep her out of trouble from the moment she set foot in Kirkwall.)

Instead, he said, “I knew what I was getting into, and I know what I’m doing. You don’t.”

“I’m not a child, you know,” she told him, with all the assurance and annoyance of a teenager announcing that he was ready to learn how to cast fireballs now, thank you very much.

“You’re not a child,” he agreed, because that much was true: she may be childish, and naïve, and unworldly, but she was probably at least a few years older than Carver. “You’re a fool, and you’re going to bring Hawke down with you, but you’re right. You aren’t a child.”

She had no response for that, just as he’d known she wouldn’t — she opened her mouth to say something, then stopped and looked away. He doubted it was guilt or shame that prompted her silence. He wished it were: if she’d realized how right he was, she might be able to do something to change her situation. Stop consorting with that demon of hers, at the least. But no, there was no realization for Merrill. In all likelihood, she was now reminding herself that he was just a human, that he knew nothing.

 

He wished there was some way to just...reach inside someone and show them how they were wrong. Not blood magic, not anything that would bend their thoughts to the will of another, but just... A spell, perhaps, to take his years of experience with exactly the bad choices she was making — experience with how the people who made those choices were inevitably killed, either by the Templars, by their fellow mages, by their demons, or by their own hands — and show those memories to her.

 

That wasn’t the same thing as blood magic. If she truly wished to keep being bullheaded afterward, then that was her prerogative. If she decided to continue being stupid, and foolhardy, and risking the lives of everyone around her, even knowing what that would inevitably lead to, then it was her decision, and he wouldn’t change that.

 

That was his line, the one he would not cross. He would take no one else’s choices away from them. He was not one of Fenris’s magisters, to make those around him dance like puppets on his whim. Sadly, Merrill wasn’t that sort of person either, but she would change. Her demon would make sure of it, or would kill her for not. That was how it always went, with blood mages.

“You said there was another door?” she asked. If she was forcing the cheerful tone, Anders couldn’t tell. There was no hint in her expression of the previous conversation.

That was...more irritating than he’d expected. She was so painfully _naïve_. She didn’t have enough experience to know where her knowledge, her power, and her will ended. She didn’t realize the precipice she was edging toward, and moreover, was _arrogant_ enough to refuse to take anyone else’s advice.

“It leads to a cellar,” Anders said, keeping his mounting anger confined to his tone. Even if he disagreed with her — even if their disagreement could potentially lead her to _succumbing to a demon while locked in a room with him_ — there was little to be gained by snapping and biting her head off right now, when he still had to spend time with her. Of course, he was free to revise that opinion at any time.

Merrill was silent for a moment, head tilted slightly to the side, evidently lost in thought. When her attention returned from wherever it had wandered, she said, “We should explore it,” and stood up.

She took a step toward the cellar door, wobbling less than he’d expected. Her ankle was still sprained, though, and as she took a second step toward the door, followed by a third and a fourth, he saw that she was barely putting any weight on it. Instead, she was using her staff as a substitute, bracing herself with it to avoid standing on the hurt ankle. She wouldn’t get far like that.

“You’re insane,” he said flatly, “and you’re going to break your neck on the stairs.” Or her ankle, come to think of it.

She hobbled past him. He considered just grabbing her. It would keep her from walking and doing further damage to herself, and it would keep her in his sight until Hawke got back and could look after her. No doubt, that would be easiest for Anders, and as he let her pass, he already regretted it.

She was an adult, he reasoned to himself, and could make her own decisions. Hawke had asked him to keep an eye on her, not to play nursemaid. There was a limit to his oversight, there had to be.

“I won’t go far,” Merrill said, smiling at him like a child promising to go no further than the edge of the family field.

He rolled his eyes. He wasn’t her father, nor was he her older brother. He wasn’t even Hawke, who seemed to see in Merrill a shadow of the little sister he had lost back in Ferelden. He was nothing to Merrill, just a friend of a friend, just a fellow apostate. “Don’t expect me to heal you when you sprain the other ankle, or break that one.” It was an empty threat and she seemed to know it, from the little smile on her face as she turned away from him and continued toward the door. He might grouse, and he might glare at her, but he’d fix the damn ankle all the same.

His regulars in Darktown knew that, and seemed to humor his exasperation. “Don’t be like that, Mister Mage,” the younger ones would say, speaking in low voices that wouldn’t carry. The older ones would duck their heads sheepishly and say, “If it’s not too much trouble...” and that would take all the anger out of his scolding.

“I’m not going after you, either,” he told her.

She didn’t even turn to look at him as she opened the door. “I didn’t ask you to.” Once through the door, she was out sight. The door shut behind her, illuminated faintly, and Anders strained to hear her footsteps.

They didn’t start down the stairs immediately. She hesitated, maybe from nerves or second thoughts, on the other side of the door. But she didn’t open it and come back into the room, and a few seconds later, he heard the slow, halting, oddly soft sound of her bootless feet moving down the stairs.

She didn’t stumble audibly, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t as soon as she was out of earshot. Anders sighed at the closed door. He shouldn’t have let her leave. Hawke was going to be disappointed, and the worse Merrill was, the more heartbroken Hawke would be.

“I’m just going to bring her back,” he said. “That’s all.” (Sometimes, speaking into an empty room, he had the wild notion that he would get a response. He never did, though, and there was a weight in his chest when he realized whose reply he was waiting for. It shouldn’t surprise him, but it did.)

He opened the cellar door and called down into the shadows, “Merrill?”

No response. This time, he hadn’t expected one. With another sigh, he descended. The stairs were steeper than they’d looked from the door, and there was no handrail. He didn’t know how Merrill, without the benefit of a wisp to see by and with one hurt ankle, had managed to _not_ trip and break her fool neck. He tightened his grip on his staff and ran his free hand along the wall.

He pulled it away quickly: the walls were cheap wood, badly joined together and rough under his fingers. If he slipped and started to fall, he could catch himself on them, but he’d come away with a hand full of splinters. It wasn’t ideal, and Anders wondered just how _long_ the supposedly noble Harvey family had been destitute. The whole estate reeked of longstanding poverty, and certainly whoever had constructed this stairway hadn’t had the sort of wealth that nobility could throw around. It was too shoddy. Besides, these stairs extended too far down to be a cellar — were they an escape route, then? Or some sort of clandestine entrance into Darktown?

He found Merrill on the last step, but he heard her long before he saw her. She was gasping, taking in gulps of air and exhaling hard. Besides her noises and his own quiet breathing, the cellar stairway was silent, without even the hurried scrabble of mice, or the soft sounds spiders’ legs made as they set their traps.

Her staff was in her lap, he noticed when he reached the step above hers. She was curled inward on herself. Her head was bent forward and the back of her neck was exposed. He walked past her, standing on the unadorned rock “floor,” and looked down at her.

Her left arm was wrapped around her knee, and she prodded at the swollen ankle with her other hand.

Drawing on his huge reservoirs of patience and willpower, he resisted the urge to kneel down and slap her hand away from her ankle. “You shouldn’t have left,” he said, casting for the second time the spell to reduce swelling. The problem with such a spell was that it did no good if the recipient kept agitating the injury, because all it could do was ease the symptom. He could make her ankle _look_ normal, and he could lessen the pain, but he couldn’t actually un-sprain it. Just like a broken bone, she’d need to give herself time to heal. “You’ll do permanent damage to that ankle if you keep traipsing off like this. Don’t you realize that?”

“I do,” she said, turning her face up to frown at him. “You said you wouldn’t follow me.”

He ignored her. “Hawke will be worried, coming back to an empty room. We should go back. It can’t take him _all_ night to go to the Hanged Man and back.”

She stared at him as if he’d started glowing, but he wasn’t nearly irritated enough to have slipped like that. “Didn’t you notice? There’s no handle on this side of the door.”

“What?”

With a sigh, she repeated, “There’s no handle—”

“I heard you,” he interrupted impatiently. Now he was growing angry enough to maybe start glowing. Not this second, but it wouldn’t take much. “Why didn’t you say anything? You let me come after you!”

She glared right back at him, for possibly the only time he could recall. “I didn’t ask you to! I certainly didn’t tell you to follow me down here and _not notice_ that there was no way back in!”

“You could have warned me! I would have let you back in!”

“I didn’t _want_ to go back in!” she shouted, and he was taken aback by her outburst enough to physically step back. He couldn’t remember her ever shouting before. “Just — just leave me alone.”  
  
Discretion was the better part of valor. He left her on the last stair to see for himself that the door was, in fact, missing a handle on this side. Merrill was right. Unlike Hawke, he didn’t attempt to ram it open, even after he realized that the hinges were on the other side.

He could either sit here and wait for Hawke, or go after Merrill and look for another way out. It was funny, he reflected as he walked away from the door, what a single, small change in scenery could do. He had been perfectly content to twiddle his thumbs in an empty room with a bored blood mage, but now, in what looked like someone’s escape route or smuggling tunnel, he hadn’t even paused before making up his mind.

Merrill had gotten to her feet in the meantime, although not much farther. He joined her, and the two of them started walking. Haltingly, as she braced herself on the rock wall and used her staff as a makeshift crutch.

They’d barely gone three steps before her limping, accompanied as it was with hissing, indrawn breaths and the _thack_ of her staff hitting the stone floor prompted him to simply grab her arm and sling it over his shoulders.

The maneuver would probably work better if she’d been Hawke, he decided, grimacing as her forearm connected painfully with his jaw. Even Isabela was closer to him in height than Merrill. As it was, they spent what felt like minutes shuffling around, and finally settled on her hanging off of his shoulder and his arm firmly around her waist to keep her from jarring her injured foot. His staff was in his off hand, and although that mattered less when casting, he’d never quite mastered blocking or swinging with his left hand.

She didn’t thank him for his help, but she no longer looked angry. He supposed that was all the gratitude he would get.

The silence was eerie: apart from his bootfalls and her odd, hitching steps, Anders couldn’t make out any sounds. Even in the clinic, he could hear rats, or mice. Bats, occasionally, in other parts of Darktown, as well as dripping water. Here, there was none of that, and the slowly circling wisp overhead cast strange, many-headed shadows on the walls around them.

“You didn’t have to come after me,” Merrill said. “Why did you?”

He stared at her, askance. “Why did I come after a fool girl with a sprained ankle who _insisted_ on walking through a tunnel that probably leads to a dead end, or the Carta, or a nest of blood mages? I can’t imagine.”

“I don’t think this is a dead end,” she said, smiling up at him. Sometimes, he had no idea what to do with this girl. “Why would anyone bother making a tunnel that goes nowhere? Or having a door like that for it?”

“It could have collapsed.” Given the condition of the house, if it had been used as an escape route, it probably hadn’t been maintained over the last few years. If someone else had been using it, though... “That doesn’t rule out Carta or blood mages.”

“That’s true! I suppose we’ll find out.”

He wanted to throttle her. Hadn’t she been angry just a minute ago? Were mood swings a symptom of some problem he hadn’t yet noticed? “Don’t sound so happy about that.”

“Aren’t you excited?” she asked, almost giggly. He nodded to himself, unconcerned that she took it as agreement: she was manic. He wondered how much sleep she’d gotten, and whether this was behavior he could expect in the future, or if the specific chain of events — the fall, the injury, the door locking, who knew what else — had prompted a unique reaction. Much as he might hope for the latter, he found the chances of it being true depressingly low. “It’s like our very own adventure! Ooh, we can tell Varric we fought a dragon. Do you think he’d believe that?”

“No. But he’ll probably repeat it anyway.” A good story was a good story, whether the facts were true or not. “We should focus on right now, though, not what we’re going to tell Varric later.”

“What’s there to focus on?” She waved the hand that wasn’t holding on tightly to his shoulder. “This is even more boring than the rest of your city.”

She had a point. Even other tunnels he’d been in had branched off, widened into large rooms, or housed anything from overgrown, poisonous spiders to lyrium-addled smugglers.

There was no way to tell time down here, either. He tried counting steps, then his breaths, then his heartbeats. He’d done that in solitary, sometimes, counting whole hours by the thump of his heart in his chest, because what else was there to do when he was locked up, away from anyone to talk to, only given food and water when he was asleep? If he’d known he would be there for a _year_ , he would have hidden a book or a scroll or even a knife somewhere.

A year away from people, away from the Fade, away from _magic_. He couldn’t imagine surviving that again.

Once again, Merrill took it upon herself to break the silence. “You said you were a Grey Warden, right?”

“You never really stop being a Warden.” It was more true than he’d ever known, before becoming one. “Why the sudden interest?”

She hesitated before asking, “Did you ever meet a Dalish Warden? Mahariel?”

Both of his eyebrows shot up, though he managed to contain his first response, which was “So all you Dalish _do_ know one another!” Instead, he said, “I did. You _do_ mean the Hero of Ferelden, and not some other Dalish Warden Mahariel?”

Merrill nodded and leaned forward. Her pupils were blown wide and she seemed to be teetering between “pleading,” with her lip stuck out a bit, and “too eager to contain herself,” with her hand clenched, white-knuckled, around her staff.

“I was hoping to hear some news...”

Anders sighed. On the one hand, if Mahariel found out that he’d been talking, she would string him up by his ankles and use him for target practice. On the other hand, considering that he’d run out when she’d been busy elsewhere, he was probably _already_ slated for target practice. _And_ , if he brushed Merrill off, he’d have to deal with her for however much longer it took Hawke and Isabela to get here.

There were an awful lot of stairs between Hightown and the Hanged Man, and Anders generally tried to make it a policy not to irritate mages with whom he was locked in a room/escape tunnel/smuggling route for the foreseeable future.

“She should be alright,” he settled on. “Don’t ask me where she is; she didn’t tell me anything. Just that she was leaving on orders from the First Warden, and to mind the new Warden-Commander.” Shaking his head, he wondered for the first time: would Mahariel have tolerated the Templars, posing as Wardens? Maybe, but maybe not. She’d not thought much of Orlais or the Orlesian Wardens, and there was certainly no love lost between her and the Chantry.

She’d also told everyone to keep quiet about Avernus. As far as Anders could tell, the old mage had never been bothered by the Templars, not even after they infiltrated Vigil’s Keep. Had the situation with Justice not worked out as it had, he might have considered fleeing to Soldier’s Peak and waiting for Mahariel to get back and set everything to rights.

That was what the old Anders would have done: the Anders who hadn’t met Mahariel — who hadn’t met Justice. Even considering it now, though, left a sour taste in his mouth. Waiting and hiding, instead of coming to Kirkwall...

“I’m glad she’s alright,” Merrill said, piercing Anders’s introspection. “Creators, does this tunnel never end?”

As it turned out, the tunnel did end, a mere twenty steps (twenty-seven inhales and exhales) after Merrill’s question. It ended in a huge cavern. Anders closed his eyes and offered Andraste a quick prayer, at the same time as he hurriedly ended the wisp’s spell. It disappeared, leaving them in darkness, but that didn’t matter: both he and Merrill had seen what was in the room.

He’d thought he knew what to expect out of Kirkwall. Insane blood mages. Brainless thugs. Enough Qunari mercenaries to man a fleet and invade Antiva. The undead. Wolves and spiders, usually larger than they had any right to be. The more-than-occasional Darkspawn. Templars, and the Tranquil, and the quiet despair of both groups growing.

He had not, however, expected _dragons_ in the _city itself_.

It was immediately clear to him that no dragon had come here on its own: first of all, as large as the chamber was, it did not seem to lead directly outside. He couldn’t remember whether it was dragons or wyverns that burrowed, but it didn’t matter, because even the stupidest dragon wouldn’t lay eggs in a cavern like this, just below a large human settlement. He thought not, anyway.

And yet, eggs there had been. He vaguely recalled encountering dragon eggs in the Silverite Mine, although he’d forgotten about most of the Architect’s assorted schemes via deliberate application of Oghren’s stash. He also remembered a couple of apprentices in the Circle trying to get a hold of dragon eggs for some nefarious purpose, although he’d never seen the eggs back then. If they hadn’t specifically asked him to get them their eggs — as if he knew how to find _dragon eggs_ — he probably wouldn’t remember that at all.

His thoughts were rambling, because curled up around a terrifying number of eggs, there had been — still was, he told himself, even if he couldn’t see her — a sleeping dragon. A high dragon, from the size of her and the presence of the eggs. Scattered throughout the chamber were a number of sleeping drakes, as well, because nothing was ever easy in life.

“We should turn back,” Merrill whispered. “It’s probably a trap.”

“You’re right.”

Neither of them made any attempt to move. Shock, Anders diagnosed. He’d been shocked every time dragons descended on him, back when the Warden-Commander had dragged him around everywhere. There was something viscerally terrifying about the beasts, an innate quality that even demons lacked.

(Broodmothers had it in spades, as well, he recalled. Seeing them had been as shocking as seeing a dragon, on top of his instinctive disgust. The Architect had been thoroughly creepy, but he’d never provoked quite the same kneejerk fear in Anders.)

“Hawke would charge in,” Merrill offered, although Anders didn’t know whether she was saying that their Fearless Leader had no sense of strategy (less true now than it had been a month ago), that Hawke would not have turned away from a whole army of dragons let alone the dozen sleeping in front of them (sadly true; Hawke was the reckless sort), or that Hawke wasn’t with them and so they didn’t have to do what he would do.

Anders offered back, “We could wait for him to get here. You’re injured, and neither of us are fighters.”

After a moment of thought, Merrill said, “Do you think they can fit in this tunnel?”

Anders gaped at her. “You want to _fight_ them? Contrary to what Varric might have told you, fighting dragons isn’t _fun_.”

“You don’t think we can do it?”

He started to answer _no_ , but then he took in just how narrow the passage was. The high dragon herself couldn’t fit, not even with her wings folded: the ceiling was too low, the walls too close together. Maybe if her wings had been cut off entirely, but they hadn’t been... Drakes could maybe squeeze in three across. The youngest ones could still swarm two mages, but those could be taken care of quickly.

Merrill had a point. They could take care of this, even without Hawke. (And wouldn’t that be impressive, he thought to himself, two puny mages without a single big strong sword-slinger killing a high dragon and her brood. That’d be something to write home about. Even Mahariel would be impressed by that.)

“Some of them could fit,” he said. “We’ll have to keep back, so they don’t get close.” He had never regretted turning down Mahariel’s offer of “arcane warrior” training as much as he did right now. Velanna, the one time he’d seen her in action, had been just as proficient with her sword as any Templar Anders had met. It’d be handy at times like these, but he and Merrill could do without. “And we need to keep back, to avoid the dragon’s fire-breath.”

“Frost spells will help,” Merrill added. “Chain of Lightning, too. You know that one, right?” The right to shoot lightning at fools, Anders thought with a brief smile. How long ago his days with the Wardens seemed, especially those first few weeks under Mahariel. “And Rock Armor, in case they get close.”

He did know both those spells, and started to say so when he heard her breathe in sharply, then lean more weight on him.

“I can help your ankle,” he told her, helping her lean against the wall instead, “temporarily. Enough so you can stand, but it will hurt more for the next few days. How much do you want to kill a dragon?”

“Do it,” she said. He was mildly surprised — after her first suggestion, he’d been half-expecting it, but she still seemed so childish that the idea of her not only agreeing but _wanting_ to kill something was a bit of a shock.

He cast the spells. There were four of them: one to keep her ankle in a sort of stasis, one to help the pain, one that would override the other two if she did so much damage to herself that her ankle might break or otherwise be permanently damaged (the most necessary of the spells, in Anders’s opinion), and finally, for the third time, the spell to ease swelling.

Merrill’s eyes were wide and bright in the wash of pale green light. “This is so exciting,” she murmured, maybe to herself. Anders didn’t comment.

Instead, he went on to create another wisp, and wished that he could swig a lyrium potion right now. Merrill watched, repeating the words of the spell after him, although she didn’t put any magic in them. Instead, she readied her staff with one hand, while her other went for her knife.

“No blood magic,” he ordered.

Looking annoyed, she said, “Most of the magic I know is blood magic!”

“Stick to other spells then! Look,” and he turned to face her fully, trying to communicate how serious he was, “if you’re going to use blood magic, then just...stand back and don’t do anything.”

“You don’t have to like what I do,” she said. “Just—”

“I don’t _trust_ you!” he shouted, and immediately regretted it. Not for the look on her face, wide-eyed and startled and hurt, and not because he didn’t mean it, because he did.

Anyone would regret it, if they forgot themselves and shouted right next to a dragon’s lair.

There was the creak of wings, a sort of rustling sound as several large bodies shifted into wakefulness. Following that were the cries: screams from the high dragon, probably, ordering the drakes to eat the intruders, and the returning shrieks from the males as they lumbered toward the tunnel opening.

Merrill and Anders stood shoulder-to-shoulder, freezing the drakes with Winter’s Hand and Cone of Cold. They cast in turns, forming a frozen buffer zone of three feet between them and the oncoming drakes. Only the last one got close enough to breathe fire, and Anders jerked Merrill back with him just as her spell froze the drake solid. A Spirit Bolt later and it was dead, shattered into several still-frozen, leaking pieces.

The high dragon shrieked again.

“The young ones are coming,” Merrill warned, sinking down to her knees.

Keeping an eye on the tunnel opening, which was empty but for drake corpses at the moment, Anders asked, “Can you stand up?”

Merrill just shook her head. “Don’t worry about me.”

“Don’t be stupid—”

“Anders!”

He cast a Cone of Cold in the direction of the cavern, freezing four dragonlings. Three more swarmed past them, and Anders barely had time to cast Winter’s Hand on one before the other two were jumping at him.

His staff caught one in midair; he swung, with as much force as he could, and the dragonling collided with the tunnel wall. It fell into an unmoving slump of dragon flesh. Meanwhile, its sibling snuck in under Anders’s guard and sunk its teeth into his shin.

Curbing his impulse to kick out, he tried to bash the thing’s head in. Most — actually, almost all — of his spells were intended for _distance_. When Merrill caught the dragonling with her own Winter’s Hand, he shot her a grateful look.

Then he stared. There were four dragonlings surrounding Merrill, each of them caught up in vines or roots with sharp, wicked-looking thorns. Two of them were still, and even as he watched, the roots lowered those ones to the ground. The other two writhed and cried out piteously, just like any other infant animal does when trapped and in pain.

Their mother cried out as well, in outrage. Anders winced. They might be small and pitiful now, but they’d quickly grow up to be at least drakes, if not high dragons themselves. Under the city, they were not just vermin, but a public menace: who even knew why these dragons had been brought or raised here? Whatever the purpose, it would cause harm to those least able to protect themselves.

He healed his bite wound. Dragons in any form were dangerous, even if they didn’t look the part. After he was fully healed, he turned his magic toward Merrill.

“I don’t want to move,” she moaned, and whimpered when he touched her ankle. The swelling had returned, and he was somewhat worried about pouring more healing magic into the same injury.

The high dragon shrieked again, and beat her wings. The tunnel was briefly lit up with a sudden rush of fire, only to fall back into darkness a moment later. Anders blinked, trying to clear the spots out of his vision.

“We can’t stay here,” he said, “and I don’t fancy my chances with that one alone.” Not with Merrill flagging the way she was. Healing her and fighting the drakes and dragonlings as well had drained him more than he’d expected. “Let’s let Hawke deal with her.”

Merrill made an unhappy noise. “I want to finish the adventure.”

“You’re delirious,” he told her. “Two mages, one of them collapsed against the wall, slaying a high dragon? Not even Varric would believe that.”

“We could do it. You have your spirit, and I have mine...”

He felt his face hardening before she had even finished. “No. Don’t even _suggest_ it. I will **not be party to blood magic**.”

When he’d turned on Hawke the first time they’d met, Hawke hadn’t even flinched. He’d cracked a joke, and expressed some concern after the fact, but he hadn’t flinched in the face of Justice. Karl had been restored, momentarily. (If they were still two separate people, in all senses, then Anders would have loved Justice for that alone. Just for giving Karl back to him, even for a moment — for letting Anders have that, he would love Justice forever.) Rolan...

Rolan had been afraid. Rolan had flinched, and run, and Anders had snapped his neck like it was a doll’s. Rolan had been a _Templar_.

Merrill, though she flinched at first, set her shoulders and stared back into his eyes. She looked sad more than afraid. She looked small.

Anders had never seen the appeal in towering over women, elves, children, or Tranquil. He’d never had any interest in bending others to his will, or forcing them into actions, or hurting them. He’d killed people, and he tried to be quick about it, but some of them died in agony; he hadn’t enjoyed it, and tried to be better next time.

Since merging with Justice, though, there had been a certain satisfaction in killing Templars and blood mages. Nothing quite like the first time, when he’d been high on endorphins and whatever magical aftereffects a mage could expect from becoming one with the embodiment of Justice. He didn’t bathe in the blood of Templars. He just felt satisfied when they were dead, because dead Templars could no longer hurt any more mages.

With blood mages, there was a certain disgust as well, because their magic was tainted and Anders could _feel_ that. He felt it now, in fact: Merrill’s magic, as obvious to him in this state as his own, made his skin crawl, although the feeling was much fainter than any of the blood mages he had killed.

“ **You are a perversion of a gift** ,” he told her.

“I don’t know why you’re so angry,” replied Merrill. She sounded annoyed. “It’s my magic, and I’m not hurting anyone with it. Well, I mean, aside from the dragons, or the bandits, or — you know what I mean.”

“ **For now** ,” he allowed. “ **That will change**.” It always did.

“You can’t know that.”

“ **I do**.”

She just shook her head. Her responses were slower than usual — and slowing down. His senses were all dulled, except for where magic was concerned, but he realized that he could smell blood on her.

“ **You—!** ” he started, furious that she had used blood magic in front of him, furious that she had used blood magic _at all_ , furious and willing to stop her in any sense of the term, until he glanced down and his fury came to an abrupt halt, crashing into his healer’s instincts and temperament.

Her thigh, which he’d healed and then mentally set aside, to be returned to in a week when any potential infection would have shown itself, was bleeding. A new gash, not from the fall but from one of the dragonlings, which she had killed...

Without blood magic. He’d have noticed; he’d looked right at her. Despite having enough blood in this one cut to make them all burst, and maybe have a little left over for their mother, she had instead used different magic.

He healed her, subdued. She watched him, and didn’t say anything, for which he was grateful. One wrong comment and he’d lose it again, and this time, he probably would regret it.

“It’s my choice, when and how I use my magic,” she said softly. “Any of it. All of it. It’s _my_ magic and I’m not going to use it — not for what you’re thinking. I won’t.”

“You can’t know that,” he told her, vaguely sure that he was parroting her own words back from what seemed like hours ago, now. “If something happens — you can’t _know_. You’ve made it an option, so it will always be an option, even when it shouldn’t be.”

“You think it should _never_ be an option,” she replied.

“Of course it shouldn’t!”

“You don’t trust any mage with it!”

He paused. Part of him rebelled at the very thought of not trusting mages; mages were his people, his friends. His cause. Another part of him, though, _didn’t_ trust mages, not with that. It was every unfair advantage that Aveline feared; it was every oppression writ large and small on Fenris, from his resentment to his tattoos. He knew, _he knew_ , that he couldn’t trust any mage with blood magic.

“You’re right,” he said. “I don’t.”

“Because you know how easy it is to give in,” she said.

He sighed, closing his eyes. He was tired. Even with a high dragon scrabbling at the rock of the tunnel entrance, trying to enlarge it, and screaming her outrage at the two mages hiding not twenty feet away from her, he wanted to just lay down and sleep. He couldn’t, though. There was always more work to be done, more people to help, and he hadn’t figured out any way to make a permanent change.

Mahariel had, more than once, told all her Wardens that there would be time to sleep when they were dead. Usually, she said it before particularly nasty work, like clearing out a Broodmother, or dealing with nobles. He had never asked if that was a Dalish saying, or if she’d picked it up during the Blight, or if it was her own.

When he didn’t say anything, Merrill added, “Because of what happened between you and your friend.”

Just as he’d thought, his fury snapped back into place, and it was all he could do to merely seethe, not touching her. “ **Do not compare me with your demon** ,” he said, the tenuous thread of his control depending on her listening. “ **I am not—** ”

“That’s not what I _meant_ ,” she said, voice breaking on the last word. “Why won’t you ever listen to what I’m _saying_?”

“ **I’m listening**.” It was more of a threat than anything else.

“You thought you were helping him,” she said. “I’m sure he thought he was helping you, too. That’s what deals are: one person helping another person. But now you’re all tangled up and you weren’t expecting that.”

He waited. Either she had a point or she didn’t, and in either case, there was no reason not to hear her out. She couldn’t sway him from the course of Justice. No one could.

“I’m saying that you and I both made choices. They weren’t good choices or bad choices, they were just...things we needed to do. And now we have to live with them, ourselves. We can’t...unmake each other’s choices, just because we think we know better. Don’t you see?”

He did see, far more clearly than she did. The demon would be her undoing.

“ **So long as your _choice_** **effects only you** ,” he said, “ **I will abide by it. The second you cause harm to another, I will take action. Justice shall be swift**.” He hesitated before adding, “It’s better, that way. You won’t want to live with yourself after your demon takes over. It’s not much of a life, anyway, in my experience.”

Merrill’s raised eyebrows seemed to indicate some sort of response to that, which she wisely kept to herself. All she said was, “And I promise you the same,” which he found both sweet and offensive.

Still, he appreciated the gesture for what it meant. _If you go too far, I’ll stop you_. Much as he might chafe at the idea of _Merrill_ checking _him_ , the theory of mages looking out for other mages who walked that line was something he could agree with.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s leave the dragon for Hawke.”

This time, she agreed, and even let him pick her up. It wasn’t best for her leg, but he carried her easily enough on his back, his arms under her knees, with her arms wrapped loosely around his neck and her forehead bumping into his ear. She held both their staffs, the tops pointed toward the ground, and occasionally one or the other scraped against the wall.

“Don’t fall asleep, or you’ll fall off,” warned Anders. She murmured something that could have passed as agreement, and tightened her arms around his neck. She squeezed her knees into his sides, too, hard enough that he wheezed, but eased off when he said, “I’m not a _horse_.”

The tunnel seemed even longer, with the dragon roaring behind them and Merrill weighing him down. Already worn from the fight, Anders stumbled a couple of times, catching himself on the walls. Merrill protested, going so far as to suggest that he put her down. He ignored her; she couldn’t walk any better than he could.

He made it to the stairs before collapsing, kneeling down in front of the first one and letting go of Merrill. The wisp disappeared, returning enough strength for him to slouch against the wall rather than lie down face-first on the stairs. As soon as he was in place, Merrill’s weight returned as she sprawled on top of him.

“Hey,” he said, pushing at her shoulder. “I’m not a bedroll.”

With a sigh, she managed to crawl onto the next step up, though she left his staff in his lap. He didn’t have the energy to move it. They weren’t touching, but he knew exactly where she was. Her breathing was nearly as loud as his, and he could still feel her magic, a little. Justice was a lot closer to the surface than he had been in days, maybe even weeks.

“You don’t have any lyrium potions, do you?”

He sighed. “Hawke had all of them. Stingy bastard.”

“Mmm.” He heard her curl up. The stairs weren’t comfortable at all, but then, Merrill was Dalish. Just like him, she’d probably slept in worse places.

“He should be here by now.”

Drowsily, she said, “I’m sure he’s on his way.”

“Yeah.”

He wasn’t sure which of them drifted off first. He wasn’t sure it mattered.

*

Anders hadn’t slept in a comfortable bed since he’d left the Wardens, so he was understandably confused to wake up in one. Especially a bed that said, “Rise and shine, Blondie.”

“Varric?” He blinked the sleep out of his eyes and confirmed that he was, in fact, in the Hanged Man. In Varric’s bed. Dimly, he hoped Varric wasn’t going to charge him too much for the privilege; it was a _really nice_ bed.

“Got it in one. I have to hand it to you, you know how to revitalize a guy’s imagination.”

He didn’t know what time it was, but it had to be too early to deal with Varric in a good, chatty mood. “What are you talking about?”

Sitting up, Anders finally saw Varric: the storyteller was at his table, chair turned to face the bed. He had his elbows on his knees and his fingers laced in front of his face, and all of his formidable attention was focused on Anders.

“Let me remind you: two mages, notorious for not getting along, are trapped in a locked room while their friends hurry to get them out. The mages, for reasons that I’m sure make sense to them, decide to explore a suspicious-looking door rather than sit and wait for help. And what should this door lead to, but a long tunnel, capped off with one raging high dragon and the corpses of her harem and brood. This ringing any bells?”

Anders groaned and fell backwards in the bed. _Definitely_ too early for this. “It was Merrill’s idea.”

Varric laughed. “I’m sure it was. I almost don’t want to know what happened. It would spoil the mystery.”

That was as good an excuse as any. Anders wasn’t too keen to tell the tale, himself — in retrospect, while he had meant everything he’d said, he’d rather not tell anyone that he’d nearly torn Merrill’s head off.

“Did you find out what those dragons were doing there?” he asked as he pulled himself out of the bed, relieved to find that he still had on all his clothes. Not that he feared for his dignity (what he had left of it), but he was glad to skip the part where he chased down his coat and shirt and boots, not to mention anything he’d left in his pockets. Isabela had the annoying ability to circulate items so that various pieces wound up on opposite sides of town — and then she’d talk Hawke into taking her down to the Black Emporium to sell whatever she had left.

Since Hawke refused to go there more than once a week (on account of “it creeps me out, how does it not creep you out?”), that meant Anders had to wait at least a week before seeing some of his possessions again. He strongly suspected that Isabela thought it was a game, and despaired of her ever giving it up.

Varric just sighed. “Probably something with the Carta. After we got you two out, they were all over the place. I’m looking into it.”

The Carta had been breeding dragons, or knew that they were being bred. Anders shuddered to think at what they could have done with dragons. Nothing good. “I’ll leave it to you, then. I should head back to my clinic.”

“Answer one question before you go, though,” Varric said as Anders headed to the door.

Anders turned to look at him. “What question?”

“Merrill’s got a new thing. A floating light thing.” Varric raised a hand and motioned in a circle over his head. “She said she wanted to show it to you, seemed to think you’d like it. Let me in on the secret?”

He knew she’d gotten the spell. Merrill was a talented mage, so she’d probably only needed to practice a few times. He didn’t see why she’d want to show it to _him_ , unless she’d somehow sustained severe enough head trauma that she thought they were friends now.

Then a thought occurred to him and he asked, “What color was it?”

Varric frowned, but didn’t even have to pause to think before saying, “Green.”

Anders laughed, and walked out of Varric’s suite without giving him an answer. The dwarf liked his mysteries, after all.


End file.
